WordPress solely being the most effective blogging platform powering millions of websites worldwide. Today, it is considered to be the most powerful content management system (CMS) that aims to deliver easy customization experience to webmasters. Customizing WordPress is not a big deal.. if you don’t know any computer languages /code…it’s absolutely fine. You need not have a computer science degree to manage your WordPress website.

Once you setup and install WordPress, the first thing you need to install some essential and highly recommended Free WordPress Plugins for your new blog so that it serves you better in future and your users get the best out of your blog.

Installing the WordPress plugins is very simple. Just click on the below-given links.. download the WordPress plugin and upload and activate through your WordPress dashboard. So, here are some highly recommended Free WordPress Plugins for new WP Blog/Website.

Below,I will be listing down all the Best Free WordPress Plugins for Security, image optimization, SEO , Database Optimization, Caching and various other plugins to make your blog load blazing fast and keep it 100% secured from various hacks.

19 Most Essential WordPress Plugins For New Blogs/Websites

1. BackUpWordPress Plugin

Yours is a new website, and no doubt its safe from hackers. But.. still you need regular backups of your WordPress website to recover the data in-case your websites goes down due to a faulty plugin or somebody hacks your website.. so to be on a safe side it’s essential to have regularly scheduled backups of your WordPress blog.

2. WordPress SEO By Yoast

The most essential and highly recommended SEO plugin for WordPress Blogs and websites.If you are blogging for money and not caring about SEO, then forget about making good bucks online like others are making. WordPress SEO by Yoast makes SEO easy for you.. you need not edit any theme or any other files to edit meta tags or need not navigate to your root directory to add robots.txt file etc..

3. Wordfence Security

SEO is very important for websites to get good rankings in the search engines. But what about website security?

Tons of websites are hacked daily. Is your website secure?

The day I started this blog, I never cared about its security as it wasn’t popular but as it gained some popularity .. I get over 30+ fraud login attempts daily. So it’s your job to keep your website secure from DAY 1. Here is all that you can do by installing Wordfence Security plugin–

Deep scan to check infected files and malware.

Keep your website secure and make your website load blazing fast

Keep an eye on all hits on your website including Humans, Crawlers, Google Crawlers, Logins, And Logouts etc.

Block fraud IP’s

Enable Caching and increase 30-50 times speed

Real-time blocking down of attackers. If another site is protected by Wordfence and attacked. The IP would be automatically blocked and you will be auto-protected.

5. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images plugin is an essential plugin for image optimization. When you search for images on Google. It shows images related to the keyword that you have searched. In the same way.. you should describe the images on your website to the search engines so that they flaunt them if any user searches for the related keywords.

How?

Make use of title and ALT tags. ALT tags are the few words that describe your images to the search engines. e.g Amazing Mt.Everest Photos. Now, How SEO Friendly Images will help?

SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin automatically adds relevant Title And ALT tags to your images for SEO. You just need to setup few options and you’re ready to go!

6. WP Smush WordPress Plugin

As I told earlier Google considers your page load time while determining rankings of your pages.So, you need to make sure that your website loads blazing fast. If your website is not loading below 3s you might lose your visitors. So, here reducing the size of your images play a very important role. WP Smush Plugin removes the unnecessary codes from your images and reduces it size to make your page load fast.

Heavy and bulky images slow down your website and you may not even knowing it .. So, having WP Smush plugin installed is must for every blog as it automatically reduces the size of the images without any manual action.

7. WP- Optimize

You must always keep your WordPress Blog/Website clean and updated for better SEO.. And same is the role of WP Optimize WordPress Plugin.. It optimizes your database and remove the unnecessary data to keep it clean. So, here is all that can be done using WP Optimize WordPress Plugin-

8. W3 Total Cache

There are many caching plugins available in the WordPress repository.. But before going to it.. Let me give you a brief description of What is Caching Plugin and how does it works.

There are number of things that contribute to your page load time. When a user wants to visit your website.. it requests a no. of info your website hosting. They deliver a request for images , Javscript and CSS and request to fetch your content from the database. All these factors contribute to your page load time.So, each time the user visits your website.. they are requesting the fresh information from your web host.. and it slows down your website.

Here comes the role of the caching plugins. They create a static version of your website and start delivering content to your visitors and that reduces your page load time and indirectly improves your ranking in the search results.

9. Ultimate NoFollow

NoFollow links are those links that don’t pass link juice to the particular page that they are pointed to. So, if your main motive is to make money through affiliate marketing then this plugin is a must for your bog as you need to NoFollow affiliate links to avoid being hit by Google Penalties. Although..Google is smart enough to know about these tricks but still it works!

11. SEO Smart Links

You might be very well knowing that interlinking is must for good SEO. SEO Smart links automatically add link to keywords , comments and phrases corresponding to the posts, pages, tags and categories on your blog.

SEO smart links allows you to add custom keywords and a set of relating URL’s. And … it also allows you to make them no-follow and open in a new window.

12. SEO Redirection

13. Pretty Link

Planning to make money from affiliate marketing? If yes, then make sure to cloak those affiliate links and Nofollow them to avoid harsh penalties by Giant Google. Use Pretty Link WordPress plugin to cloak links.

14. Sharebar

I have used many Free Social Sharing plugins on my blog but unfortunately most of them were creating some kind of bugs. They were not responsive on mobiles..After researching a lot I came to know Sharebar and its completely a responsive and Best free social sharing plugin available in the WordPress repository.

15. Growmap Anti Spam Bot Plugin

If you are having a new blog.. then you might not get spam comments but slowly and slowly there will be flood of spam comments to your posts. No need to worry.. Growmap Spam Bot Plugin will prevent 99% of automated spam bots. GASP creates a small check-box below the comment box asking them whether they are spammers or not. This box is not visible by bots so you’re protected!

16. Forget About Shortcode buttons

FASC buttons allows you to add CSS buttons to your posts. Now, you need not create shortcodes separately to add buttons as now you can insert self-designed CSS buttons directly from the WordPress editor.

17. Contextual Related Posts

Contextual related posts WordPress plugin Display related posts on your WordPress blog. The related posts list is completely based on title/content of the posts and that of the interest of the user. Using contextual related posts delivers no. of benefits such as Low bounce rate.. Increases average time spent on your blog.. Refresh old post and overall improve your SEO.

18. TablePress

Framing a table on my WordPress blog was the most difficult task for me.. until I knew about this plugin. I am very poor at HTML so I started researching a plugin to create tables in WordPress without using HTML and I came to know about.. TABLEPRESS. It’s completely a free WordPress Plugin to create tables without using HTML. Here is a tutorial on how to use Tablepress.

19. WP Product Review

I consider WP product review as the best review plugin for WordPress. If you are an affiliate marketer.. then using WP Product review is must for you to display reviews with ratings , pros, cons , and user reviews to boost your conversions and multiply your affiliate sales.